Tips + Tricks

Logi Tutorial: How to Create Engaging Visual Content

By Nat Venkataraman

Full Transcript

The analysis grid makes it possible to explore, shape, and visualize data through an easy-to-use web interface. With the analysis grid, users can create engaging visual content, filter and aggregate data, and find meaningful answers without technical skill or help from IT. This report was created in less than 10 minutes. In this video we’re going to reconstruct this report while learning the fundamentals of using the analysis grid. Let’s take a look at the tools and features the analysis grid has to offer.

I’ll start by selecting a data source. There may be multiple options available to you. This is the underlying database that we desire to connect and pull data from. You now have a list of tables to choose from. The data sets can be joined together to provide extra data fields. You may also want to tick the check boxes next to each data field name. This will remove it from the data request.

Before we begin creating charts, it’s important to understand how to filter and format and manipulate data. You may have already noticed that there are tabs for formulas and filters as well as tools for adding charts and crosstabs. There’s also an undo and redo feature in case a mistake is made.

Filters are really simple to add. Select the filter column, choose a comparator, and then set the value to filter by. You can create as many filters as needed and you may also remove or edit existing filters. The formulas allow you to make calculations using data fields you’ve selected. The formula help button provides some in depth explanations for the functions and tools available in this feature.

If you noticed when data is selected, you’re given a table with the resulting data. The table has tooling for showing, hiding, sorting, grouping, aggregating, and paging. Now it is possible to focus these modifications to a specific column or field of data. You can achieve this by clicking on the column header. This will allow you to select from an option list in the menu, and in this case, I’d like to format my freight data as currency. When I create charts or other report content, the freight information will display as currency instead of a basic number.

Now that our data has a formatting, we can continue to building a chart. The chart creator tool has many options that help us visualize the data. The analysis grid will detect field data types automatically and guides us to making a chart that makes sense. Start by selecting the label column. This will be the label for each bar in the chart. Notice how the tool knows that this is a date field and provides us temporal grouping options. Now let’s select the freight field in the data column. This will show us how much freight was paid for each quarter. It looks like we need a bit more room to correctly display the content of this visualization so we can do this by simply clicking and dragging the handles on the right bottom or right bottom corner. Drag the chart and size to your desired height and width.

Certain charts allow for the use of forecasting. In this chart, I want to use a logarithmic regression to show what the next two quarters might look like. And we do have quite a few different options available that would fit our use case. Looking good. Now let’s build a cross tab table. In a similar fashion to the chart creator, the crosstab creator guides us through to build a useful content. I want to use this table to break down all of the totals displayed in the bar visualization, but now I can see how much freight we’re spending for each country. This gives me deeper supplemental information that I might not have previously been aware of.

For each column, we can reorder it and resize. I’m going to resize the columns in this table to make it a little bit better for a presentation and viewing experience. Simply click the handles and move them around or click the handle on the right hand side and that will allow you to readjust the size. Now that we’re done with the crosstab and we’ve got now two different visual pieces which we can display to users. So in this case, I think I want my bar above the cross tab. And you’ll notice all I had to do was simply click and drag and we can rearrange the blocks on this.

This report can be given a specific name, which can help us identify what content or information it contains when we come back to it, or perhaps share it with other users. The analysis grid has a baked in auto save feature, so any changes we make to the report are saved automatically without the user having to manually click a button. We’ve completed our report and we’re ready to ship it out to other users.

Originally published August 9, 2019

About the Author

Nat Venkataraman is a Director of Product Management at Logi Analytics. He has over 20 years of experience working for software and business intelligence products.